Why Leading Hospitals Are Practicing IT Automation
By Mehul Amin, Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI)
Hospitals and other healthcare organizations are reaping the benefits of IT Automation for a number of business, operational and data management processes. For instance, IT Automation can provide functionality that enables building workflows faster and more reliably, improving coordination of disparate technologies and tools used by various internal departments, third party providers and vendors, and provides a cohesive approach with increased efficiency. Healthcare in particular calls for extra measures to be taken to not only create a more efficient workflow, but to integrate security measures that align with federal regulations such as HIPAA. For the healthcare industry, it is imperative to use an IT solution that ensures compliance, while providing a unified approach to monitor and implement change across a variety of disparate workload technologies.
Security of data and compliance with federal regulations will continue to be a main concern for healthcare IT teams. With important regulations like HIPAA surrounding patient data, the modern healthcare IT organization needs to build not only a reliable and efficient system to integrate platforms across the board, but one that creates a single point of control to manage sensitive data. An intelligent IT Automation solution that utilizes an Architectural, Layered Approach can build a central control platform for data processing, translation, and assessment while integrating the mandatory compliance and security measures.
Information, technology, and business processes are becoming more and more interconnected every day, making compliance and privacy protocols significantly more complex. Successful organizations will look towards a comprehensive IT Automation framework that can provide capabilities such as auditing, revision history, policy authorization, and provide advanced management of workflows. While organizations are continually fighting against cyber-attacks and security hacks, protecting the enterprise network can be a costly and wearisome endeavor without a centralized IT Automation platform.
Examining this issue, healthcare IT departments manage a large amount of sensitive data, and departments plus external partners often use their own technologies to address the specific needs relevant to them. Data needs to be shared, and users need to be able to manage dependencies across systems never designed to work together. The processes of managing patient and employee data across these disjointed systems can be time-consuming. By streamlining processes and providing a unified platform to oversee the transfer and translation of data across a variety of technologies, IT Automation can provide a more secure and compliant ecosystem appropriate for healthcare organizations.
For example, prior to moving to an IT Automation solution that takes an Architectural, Layered Approach to IT Automation, the Children’s Hospital & Medical Center of Omaha’s data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tasks were accomplished through a combination of manual operations and internally-generated scripts. Job scheduling was conducted on a variety of technologies by the hospital’s data administrators. Children’s realized that their existing system was not agile enough to handle the complex, multi-platform tasks required by the massive amount of data generated from high patient load. By unifying the managing processes for a wide range of data warehousing and report delivery, Children’s found the power of taking a central approach to IT Automation the solution to keeping up with the growing demands of a large medical center.
IT Automation can make the difference between frustrating, time-consuming manual management and a fast, reliable IT environment that drives business value, as well as both patient and employee satisfaction. An intelligent IT Automation solution can help free employees from repetitive tasks and focus on other important responsibilities, giving them the ability to directly drive business value. For healthcare organizations to grow, creating a technological environment that evolves to continuously integrate innovation, regulatory, and security changes will be the determining factor in their success.
About The Author
Mehul Amin, Director of Engineering for Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI). A veteran of ASCI for over 20 years, Mehul has held roles as product engineer and technical support manager and played an integral part in building the company’s IT Automation solution, ActiveBatch. In his current role, Mehul drives high-profile initiatives and leads both the Product Engineering and Release Engineering teams. Mehul received a Master’s in Computer Science from the Stevens Institute of Technology.